The Polish State Archives are located at Plac Wolnosci--Liberty Square--at the center of Lodz. It is fitting that from the second story room where I search for family records, I can see my mother's apartment building at Pomorska 6. When she was a young woman, she could walk a few steps and be at the beginning of Europe's longest commercial boulevard, an avenue that is still beautiful and crowded with young people, street musicians, and boutiques in spite of the proliferation of malls here.
The Archives offices are old, dreary, and dusty, and its clerks struggle under an overload of work. They cough constantly from the dust and mold. They are kind enough to remember me from last year and are waiting with the large census volumes that I need. My Polish is non-existent except for "thank you" and "goodbye," and the archivists' English is halting, but we manage: I point to documents and raise my eyebrows, and somehow they know what my question is. They say, "moment," and come back with another needed volume.
Their systems are antiquated. I look at old index cards with individual names which must be cross-referenced to the documents. I have to fill out a card requesting the documents; they arrive 30 minutes later; if I want a scan of the document, we go downstairs to an old copy machine; we fill out a ticket for the copies; I go to another office and pay for the copies, receiving a hand-written receipt which I then present to the archivist so I can get my copies.
Each copy costs $2, and I am making lots of copies. I am probably responsible for an uptick in the local economy! One of the archivists asks me if I am an "eccentric millionaire" from America because of my apparently foolish requests for copies. I try to explain to him that genealogy is an expensive hobby but that I am hardly a millionaire.
He asks me why am I so interested in the records for my family, and I tell him "that is all that I have of my aunts, uncles, and cousins." I don't have the words or gestures to explain that I am trying to reconstruct my family and to find out what happened to them. He responded that another American was in the Archives yesterday trying to prove that he was related to the Sikorskys of helicoptor fame. Apparently this visitor was also making lots of copies. The archivists thought this was very funny and strange, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the visitor was related to that famous family.
Some of the documents that I want are censuses from the early 1900s. They are bound in tomes that weigh 20 pounds and are written in Russian. I will get copies on a CD and then email the files to a friend in Canada who can translate them for me.
From the Archives, I walked to the Jewish Community Center, home to 300 religious Jews who have returned to Lodz over the years. There were 240,000 Jews in Lodz at the beginning of the war. I dropped by a friend, Marek Szukalak, to thank him for his help and give him a copy of my book about my parents. (In 2009, Marek found the graves of my great-grandparents as well as an advertisement in the Lodz Business Directory placed by my grandfather.) Marek smokes like a fiend and doesn't speak any English, so I just hugged him, said "thank you" in Polish, pointed to the pictures in my book, and took off, grateful to have an excuse to leave his smoke-filled office.
From there, I went to the local Lodz library in search of an obscure reference periodical that listed the members of the Galas family who survived (the ones who wound up in Sweden). The Communist mentality is still alive and well in the Library. I had to lock up my belongings and go through security and several locked doors before I could get to the stacks and reference section. Imagine what you have to go through to check out a book!
In order to be helped, I sat at a computer terminal and typed my request in English at Google Translate and the reference librarian responded in kind. It was fun! Unfortunately, the document I wanted no longer exists--or as Google said, "We have gaps here."
My friend Kasia visits me tomorrow. We'll head out to Piotrokowska, the shopping area I mentioned earlier, and I'll show her my mother's town.
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